first off, your windows install and all your apps will *never* approach 74gb, unless you're planning on having a LOT of games etc installed.

If i was building a new performance pc these days, i'd go athlon64, without a doubt.

1gb of memory, or even 2gb if you can stretch that far.

as for video data hard drive tomfoolery, raptors would be lovely, yep. 2x74gb drives would be nice, raid0'd. Guess it depends on how much footage you'll be editing at a time, really.

The video card is practically unimportant. you'd be better off with cheaper card, and a second monitor, rather than buying a top of the range ati or nvidia card. For video editing, a ti4200 will do everything a brand spanking new card will do, at 1/6 of the price, saving money to spend on other things. Unless you're wanting to play games, of course. Really though, dual-monitors will help with any kind of design or editing. I recently built a website, and i'd have loved to have had another monitor here.

dvd writers are dirt cheap, and pretty much all do the same thing, but i've had good experiences with pioneer drives.

Really though, you need to tell us what you'll use the pc for. is it JUST for video editing, and that alone?

The video card is practically unimportant. you'd be better off with cheaper card, and a second monitor, rather than buying a top of the range ati or nvidia card. For video editing, a ti4200 will do everything a brand spanking new card will do

Not wholly true. Some video editing software can actually utilise the GPU providing you with RT effects without them having to render, as well as improved rendering performance for those effects which cannot be done in RT. Pinnacle's Liquid Edition benefits from a faster video card and also supports the PCI Express cards too (I am sure there are other suites too but I don't know about them).

A 74GB HDD is on the small side if it is the drive which will be holding your video editing projects, render files and captured media. However, it's plenty large enough for an operating system only drive.

I agree with almost everything people have said. The Intel is reliable enough, but like p4ocer said, the A64 is more futureproof, and just wait until 64bit software becomes more readily availble. Whoosh!

DVD writers - the only ones I've had experience of are the NEC and Sony range, which seem to work perfectly well. Make sure you get a Dual Layer writer as they're only a few pounds/dollars/whatever more than single layer.

I don't necessarily agree wth what LJR was saying about video cards. Sure, some of the older cards may struggle with realtime effects, but even the middle-to-low range of cards (Nvidia FX5700 or ATI radeon 9600 or above) should be more than up to the job.

Dual monitor is a HUGE bonus. You'll wonder how you did without 2 monitors. A much better and more cost-effective way of getting the same resolution on a bigger single monitor. My second monitor just failed though. Boo Hiss.

The performance difference I have seen quoted from tests (again this is Pinnacle) is that you can render in realtime up to 8 layers of High Definition Video (1080i) when using a high-end 256MB graphics card, and only around 3 without.

Most video editing packages don't provide the ability for rt effects (without additional bespoke hardware). Most require you to render all effects on the timeline before viewing them. In LE you can view a good many of the effects without rendering, however, this is obviously dependent on the performance of the graphics card as it utilises the GPU for this.

The performance difference I have seen quoted from tests (again this is Pinnacle) is that you can render in realtime up to 8 layers of High Definition Video (1080i) when using a high-end 256MB graphics card, and only around 3 without.

Fair enough, but there are other options to take into account.

As most people aren't working in HDV yet (including petrolhead), for the time being there may not be much of a call for the amount of power to utilise that.

Also, there are budgetary constraints too. Personally, if my choice was between an extra monitor and a faster video card, I would choose the extra monitor. If you've got the money to buy both, then by all means do so, but personal preference would be to choose a larger workspace over a higher frame rate.

Not forgetting that a quiet PC was one of the prerequisites, so the faster cards as a rule require more cooling.

There isn't really a right and a wrong answer to this question, just personal preference.